The story usually goes something like this: A motorist traveling on a dark, desolate road picks up a mysterious lady who – wouldn’t you know it – turns out to be a ghost.

The tale is as old as the hills, folklorists say. But Chicago has its own variation of the story and even a name for the spirit: Resurrection Mary.

Often described as a young lady in a white evening gown, she is usually characterized as a roaming ghost on her way to Resurrection Cemetery – in the southwest suburb of Justice, Ill. -- her final resting place.

Self-styled ghost hunter, author and tour guide Richard Crowe said he has interviewed a dozen eyewitnesses who claim to have given Mary a lift or to have seen her taking a twilight stroll along Archer Avenue, where the Catholic cemetery is located. Crowe said the oldest of the stories came from the late Chicagoan Jerry Palus, who insisted he met a blond woman named Mary in 1939 at a local dance hall and offered her a ride home.

Although the passenger said she lived at 47th and Damen, she asked to be driven south on Archer, Crowe said.

“So he’s driving out there with her and she says, ‘Pull over,’ and they’re across from Resurrection Cemetery,” he said. “She says ‘I must cross the road now, you cannot follow me.’ And she jumps out of the car rapidly, runs across the street, and then she vanishes.

“And that’s when he said he realized why the woman he was dancing with that night felt ice-cold to the touch,” Crowe said. “The only other time he felt anybody like that was working part-time at a funeral parlor.”

Crowe said Palus went to the girl’s Damen Avenue address and got some startling news from one of her relatives. Mary had died some years before, he learned.

Another local ghost-story expert, Ursula Bielski, said she has heard from about 20 people in the past two decades who say they crossed paths with Resurrection Mary. She said the eyewitness nature of the stories lend them legitimacy, but she doesn’t rule out conventional explanations in some cases. Some of the motorists could simply have been nodding off at the wheel and dreamed the girl, she said.

“I think probably there are a lot of things going on with the Resurrection Mary story,” Bielski said. “There are probably a lot of ghosts wandering around Archer Avenue. I also think there’s a lot of our imagination involved.”

Bielski theorizes that Resurrection Mary may be the ghost of a 12-year-old South Side girl who perished in a car accident in 1927 after spending an evening at a dance hall with her father. Others think the spirit can be traced to a woman who was killed in a car accident in the Loop in 1934.

The Resurrection Mary stories may differ in details, but in all of them the central character is a benign, if slightly creepy, ghost with an apparent mission.

“Most ghosts are doing their own thing and we’re trespassing on their time and space and not the other way around,” Crowe said. “We have this arrogance here that we are the living and therefore the dead should make way for us.”

Alas, the spine-tingling yarn may be too good to be true.

Academics say Resurrection Mary is part of a centuries-old tradition of “vanishing hitchhiker” stories that are passed off as real-life experiences. Researcher Jan Harold Brunvand seemingly debunks the tales in his 1981 work “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” a book credited with popularizing the idea of “urban” legends or myths.

His book says the framework of the story was already common by the turn of the 20th century. As automobiles became more prevalent, horses and buggies were replaced with cars. The author cites a number of versions of the story from across the country, and some of them end as the Palus story does -- with a relative breaking the eerie news about the hitchhiker’s earlier demise.

A colleague of Brunvand’s, folklore professor Janet Langlois of Wayne State University, said the basic story suggests the themes of “mortality and what needs to be resolved and what hasn’t been resolved.”

Analysis aside, Langlois said she doesn’t shrug off every account.

“I don’t debunk everything and I don’t believe everything,” she said. “I do believe that some people who have had these experiences are not lying, are not hallucinating. I’m not sure what they’re doing. I’m not sure how I feel about life after death, and I’m in the much more middle position of being uncertain.”

Crowe said he believes Resurrection Mary exists. He said the last sighting he knows about was in 2000.

“Just because something is an archetype doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen once in a while,” Crowe said.

Mike Ramsey can be reached at (312) 857-2323 or ghns-ramsey@sbcglobal.net .

CHICAGO HAUNTS

Ghost payrollers aren’t the only creatures that go boo in Chicago. Here is a sampling of supposedly haunted sites in the Windy City:

• The Red Lion Pub. Multiple ghosts are said to haunt this Lincoln Park tavern and may explain why some patrons have become “trapped” in the restrooms. The pub is across from the legendary Biograph Theater, where bank robber John Dillinger met his end in 1934.

• The John Hancock Tower. Before the skyscraper was built, Chicago occultists warned that its trapezoidal design could serve as a gateway for evil forces, and numerous tragedies have occurred since, ghost hunter Ursula Bielski says.

• Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge. The legendary defense attorney’s ashes were scattered at the Jackson Park Lagoon after his 1938 death. In recent years, witnesses say they have seen an elderly gentleman in period clothes at the bridge, which was erected in Darrow’s memory.

• 22nd Place, Chinatown. Folklorist Richard Crowe says this ethic block south of the Loop is haunted and claims to have encountered a woman ghost there on one of his tours.

GHOST TOURS

For more information about Richard Crowe and his ghost-related tours of Chicago, go to www.ghosttours.com . Information about author Ursula Bielski, another “ghost hunter” who leads tours, can be found at www.chicagohauntings.com .

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